Bilberry

Wild forest berries – picked in huge quantities in Polish woods each summer, they go into pierogi, sweet buns and home-made preserves.

The bilberry is a dwarf shrub 15–50 cm tall, with angular green stems and small, ovate leaves that fall in autumn. In spring it bears inconspicuous, roundish, greenish-red flowers, and in July and August it fruits, producing dark blue berries with a bluish bloom. Unlike the cultivated highbush blueberry, it has dark purple flesh that stains lips and hands. It grows on acidic soils in pine, spruce and mixed forests, often forming dense carpets in the undergrowth.

Significance in the country

Berry-picking is a long-standing summer tradition – bilberry pierogi and jagodzianki, yeast buns filled with bilberries, are among the symbols of the Polish summer. For many people in villages near large forest areas, selling bilberries was, and sometimes still is, an important source of income.

Where it grows

In forests throughout the country, most abundant in the lowland pinewoods – in the Tuchola Forest, the Augustów Forest, Kashubia and Masuria – and in the mountains, where it reaches the dwarf mountain pine zone.

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